Our Record of the Month for March is the 10th anniversary reissue of Beach House’s Devotion, which has been newly half-speed mastered at 45 RPM on 2 LP, 180 gram vinyl, and featuring deluxe package details you can’t get anywhere else. Read below to find out why we picked Devotion, and how the band was involved in the reissue from the start.

Andrew Winistorfer: People always ask “Why did you guys pick this?” and in this case, it’s kind of a really easy answer, right? We all love Beach House, and when the opportunity came up, we all agreed we should do a Beach House record.

Cameron Schaefer, Vinyl Me, Please Head of Music: [laughs] Yeah, basically we all love Beach House, and want our members to listen to them. Getting this opportunity to work with them is something we’ve wanted for a long time.

Before I ever worked at VMP, I actually bought Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars from the VMP store, back when it was like 10 titles only.

So the follow-up question is why Devotion?

A lot of people I know who love Beach House, came into them during the Teen Dream / Bloom era. Both incredible records, but it feels like Devotion has ended up as a slightly overlooked album, where people are maybe aware that it’s in their catalog, but haven’t explored it as much as the newer albums. It’s really the album where they found their sound and the fact that it’s the album’s 10th anniversary this year was a good opportunity to put the spotlight on the album in a new way. It’s a good album to give to people who have never listened to Beach House or are only vaguely aware of them, and it’s an album that some of their big fans might not have spent as much time with.

Yeah, for sure. There’s a lot of stuff on there that people who came later need to get acquainted with. “Gila” might be my favorite song from them, still.

Let’s talk the packaging and remastering. As I understand it, the band has been involved with this since the beginning, since they own the masters now, right?

Yeah, they’ve been involved since day one on this edition. When we were planning with them, we talked about how we wanted to make this the definitive edition of this album that’s ever been released on vinyl. They were excited to rework this album’s package and mastering to make this one that collectors and Beach House fans thought was amazing.

So we decided to have it half-speed mastered at 45 RPM, and we’ve put it on 180 gram vinyl, and two LP, which gives a lot of space for this album on the records, making it sound better than it has ever sounded. It’s an audiophile-level pressing. Then we put it on a new cloud effect that we’ve never done before, and the band approved the color choice, and they approved the test pressings themselves.

We then put the album into a gatefold jacket, that’s tip-on. It’s a super heavy jacket.

And then you had Victoria Legrand do some stuff for a poster in the package.

Yeah, the band dug through stuff they have from the period, and Victoria had handwritten lyrics, which we turned into a 12- by 24-inch poster that’s included in the package.

In my opinion, this is the most deluxe package we’ve put together for our members, from the remaster, to the jacket, to the color.